Darkness
by TheInvisibleQuestion
Summary: Clarke and Bellamy find themselves trapped in a pitch-dark room with no way out. (Canon Divergence, 2x09.)
1. Chapter 1

Clarke doesn't know where she is, but even before she opens her eyes, she knows it's not somewhere pleasant. The ground is hard and kind of cold, and when she opens her eyes there's nothing to see. It's also very quiet, but she can hear slow, steady breathing a few feet away. She strains her eyes through the darkness but sees nothing. She feels around her for a wall or a ceiling, but there's nothing within arm's reach. There are old furs beneath her, or maybe old carpet. She really hopes it's not carpet. The mountain men have carpet.

She's not wearing shoes any more, and everything else she had is gone, too, except for her clothes. She's wearing socks, but like so many things from the Ark, they're too worn out to be any protection against the chill. She's getting uneasy—really uneasy, because she can't remember how she got here or what she was doing before she passed out or fell asleep or whatever. She stands up—slowly, in case the room is shorter than she is—and then stretches her arms up, trying to reach the ceiling. Even with her best jump, though, all she finds is empty air.

The breathing next to her changes. There's a sharp intake and a confused murmur which, despite being sleep-grogged, is unmistakably Bellamy's. "Bellamy?" she asks anyway, just to be sure.

"Clarke? Where are we?" Bellamy asks. Clarke picks a direction and walks, but she collides with him instead of the wall she was looking for.

"Sorry," she mutters, and walks away from him until her outstretched hand meets a wall. The floor is consistently moss or fur or carpet until it reaches the wall, which feels like cement, but might be smoothed-out stone. "Damn it!" She'd hoped their surroundings would give her a clue about their captors—grounders or mountain men?—but in the darkness everything is just so ambiguous.

She feels a hand brush against her arm, and she shies away. "It's just me. Don't move." She hears his footsteps, muffled on the floor, walking away. His fingers whisper against the wall, softer and softer, then louder and louder as he walks the perimeter of the room.

"Round. About the size of the drop ship," he says.

"Great."

"And I didn't find any doors or windows. Unless we find a ceiling, I have no idea how to get out of here."

"The same way we got in," Clarke says. "Probably that ceiling we can't reach."

"Probably?"

Clarke shrugs, and then realizes he can't see her. "I can't remember anything. Can you?"

"I remember—um. I remember…" Bellamy coughs. "Damn. I remember your mom and Kane arguing about what to do about Jaha."

"That was last week," Clarke points out. "And they weren't arguing about Jaha. Not really." She rolls her eyes, because Bellamy can't see her.

"We went out to the lake," Bellamy adds after a couple of heartbeats. "You wanted to know if it could be fished, and Lexa's people wouldn't go with you because the River Clans live near there."

"Yeah, but then we went back to camp, remember?"

"That's right. I don't remember anything after that."

Clarke heaves a sigh, wishing her annoyance could do more than just echo off the walls of the pit. "So we're just… stuck here."

"You're not going to try to escape?"

"What do you want me to do? Scale the walls like a spider? Grow rockets on the bottom of my feet and fly out of here? I don't even have shoes."

"Well, neither do I. Hey, maybe there's a light switch in here somewhere."

"I don't see one," Clarke jokes.

"Okay, fine. You don't want to find a way out of here? Maybe we'll just sit. Someone's got to come eventually, right? We'll just ask nicely, because diplomacy works _really well_ on Earth these days." Clarke hears Bellamy flop onto the floor with a dull _thunk_, and both of them are silent for a very long time.

* * *

"Clarke?"

Bellamy's voice startles her out of a deep reverie, or maybe a nap; it's impossible to tell the difference in this lightless hell.

"What?"

He doesn't respond.

* * *

Hours later—judging by the hunger gnawing at her guts—there's a series of loud scraping noises to Clarke's right. Something smells different. New. _Good_. It's not anything like her dad's cooking or her favorite Earth foods, but it makes the hunger pangs in her stomach knot even tighter. She finds it before Bellamy does, and he runs into her before she can tell him she's already found it. He doesn't even apologize, just scoots away from her and asks what it is.

Clarke feels the area like a blind person, fingers running over the objects and painting pictures in her head like weird sculptures. "Food," she says. "Soup and water. There's only one."

"One what?"

"One everything. One pitcher, one bowl, one spoon."

"Okay, so we share."

It's awkward at first, passing the single spoon back and forth, until Bellamy points out that it would be easier to just pass the bowl. By the time they get to the bottom of the bowl, it feels less like sharing a bowl of prison food and more like some weird ritual.

The soup is filling, and when it's gone, Clarke feels like she's had a feast. They wash it down with some of the water, and Clarke starts to feel drowsy. "Good soup," she comments. She's mere seconds from total unconsciousness when she realizes that any meal, no matter how good and warm and filling, should never make her this sleepy, this fast. "Bellamy!" she snaps. She casts her hands around until one of them hits him in the face. "Bellamy!"

He mumbles something and smacks Clarke's hand away. Her panic-induced adrenaline rush fights against whatever was in the soup, and she can barely get a reply out through the haze. "No, no! Wake up, Bellamy!" she shouts, but he just smacks the floor next to him.

"'S okay," he slurs. "'S just a li'l nap."

Clarke's panic loses out to the drugged soup, and she collapses next to Bellamy, trading the black of the pit for the black of unconsciousness.

* * *

A/N: This fic can also be found on AO3.


	2. Chapter 2

Waking up is long, slow work. There are still drugs in her system, and she has to fight through them just to sit up. Another minute, and Clarke realizes she really has to pee. She wonders if there's a bucket or something they haven't run into yet, and after a few minutes of careful searching, she finds a patch of floor near the wall that is covered by a wooden board instead of fur-carpet. She lifts the board, and there's a hole in the floor. It smells like plain dirt, but she doesn't dare investigate further. She's hesitant to pee in an open room with Bellamy right next to her, but then she remembers that it's pitch dark and he won't see her anyway. And he's not even awake yet.

She makes sure to put the board back where she found it so nobody's going to step in the toilet hole. Not that they're gonna do a lot of roaming around this room.

There's a sudden noise like scrambling limbs and she hears Bellamy's panicked voice call her name. "Clarke? Clarke!"

"I'm right here." She's feeling her way back to the tray so she can get some water and Bellamy collides headlong into her, all grabby, panicky hands. "Jesus, Bellamy, calm down."

He's shaking like a leaf, and that's what gets Clarke worried. She's been through hell and back with him, and she's never known him to turn into a human earthquake. He lets go of her and moves away. "Yeah. Sorry. Bad dream," he says, and lapses into silence so quiet that Clarke has to listen hard to hear him breathing.

"I think the soup was drugged," she says after a while. It's still hard to think, and she's pretty sure she's still dozing on and off.

Bellamy grunts in agreement.

Clarke hears the loud scraping noise that signals food, but neither she nor Bellamy goes to inspect it. She finds the wall and sits against it, hoping to resist the drowsiness still present in her system. She listens to the quiet and the darkness, and if not for the cold wall against her back, she'd swear she's in some kind of limbo. She wonders if this is what being dead feels like: silence and darkness for eternity, nothing for company but endless streams of thought in between bouts of oblivious sleep. She wonders if maybe she is dead, and for some twisted reason she can't fathom, she's been trapped in her eternity cell with Bellamy Blake.

If that's true, then Bellamy probably isn't real, she guesses. He did act pretty weird. But… she can't be dead. She just can't be. What about her people? The ones still trapped in Mt. Weather, the ones still living at Camp Jaha, even the splinter group that walked off and vanished—they need her.

If she's dead...

If she's dead...

If she _died_...

No. The food. She wouldn't need to eat if she was dead. Or pee. Would she?

Clarke blinks furiously, tries to clear the vision she doesn't really have, jams the heels of her hands into her eyes until she sees spots floating in the darkness, shakes her head. She's going crazy. This is what going crazy feels like.

You're not dead, she tells herself, taking a few long, deep breaths. You're not dead. You're just in a dark pit somewhere. Not dead. She needs to stay awake, She stands up and does a few jumping jacks, and trips on nothing in the darkness.

Maybe she should eat the damn soup and figure the rest out later.

Clarke inches her way around the room until she comes to the tray of food. She feels for the spoon, and the noise of the spoon against the tray is loud in the pitch darkness. It rings in her ears. She sticks three of her fingers in the soup by accident, and licks them clean without thinking. It's probably not enough soup to knock her out cold—she'd had half the bowl last time—but she hasn't quite decided whether or not she wants to succumb to the soup.

"Clarke?"

Clarke freezes, a finger still in her mouth. She'd forgotten about Bellamy. "Yeah?"

"I don't think that's a good idea."

"The soup?"

"Yeah."

"Got a better idea?"

"No." There's a long silence, and then, "I'm not hungry."

Clarke finds the spoon again and puts her other hand on the edge of the bowl. She's poised and ready to eat, but when she finally goes to eat, she realizes that the soup is an escape, and drinking it is the easy way out of this prison. She drops the spoon into the bowl with a wet _plop_. She drinks a bit of the water, hoping it's not drugged like the soup, and sits against the wall, waiting. After ten minutes—_one exodus ship, two exodus ship, six hundred exodus ship_—Clarke says, "I don't think the water's spiked."

Bellamy doesn't answer.

Clarke shrugs, curls up on the floor, and does her best to fall asleep without narcotic aids.

* * *

Clarke's head breaks the surface of the water, and she wipes a bit of kelp off her nose. Bellamy's four or five feet away, treading water. "What do you think?" he asks.

The trees around the pond are bathed in silver, and the butterflies on the shore glow a soft blue in the warm night air. Clarke had read about summer on the ground, but nothing she'd ever read came even close to this. "It's beautiful."

Bellamy's stare is unmistakable when he says, "I know."

Clarke doesn't—can't—feel that way about him. She's the leader of their people, whether or not her esteemed mother is willing to admit it, and he's her second in command, her most trusted advisor. He's her political partner. Her sidekick, even. She can't—

But under the night sky in the summer air, here, alone, away from all that...

Clarke sinks under the water until her toes touch the sandy bottom of the pond, and then she shoves off, hard, angling for the shore. Bellamy is quick to follow, and then it's a race to the water's edge. Clarke has a head start, but Bellamy's a strong swimmer, and they drag themselves onto the dry sand at the same time, panting and laughing. "I think it's a tie," Clarke says.

Bellamy scoffs. "Not even close, princess."

Clarke rolls her eyes, and then there's a terrifying shriek and the ground underneath her shakes and suddenly there's a massive water snake leaping out of the pond, lunging for the tasty mammals lounging on the sand. Clarke shouts, but the creature already has Bellamy by the ankle and is dragging him back into the water. Clarke looks around for something she can fight with, but it's gotten dark all of a sudden and the butterflies are gone, and when she looks up the full moon and the stars have vanished too, and the world explodes into noise and then the noise explodes into silence.

* * *

Clarke scrambles awake, clawing at the floor. "Bellamy!" she shouts, still under the influence of the nightmare. He grunts, and he sounds like he's half asleep himself. She's breathing hard, as if she'd narrowly avoided getting eaten by a killer eel herself. She takes a deep breath and tries to bring herself back to the present. The super dark, super quiet, super weird present. "How long was I out?" she asks.

"I dunno," he answers, though it sounds more like a grunt than actual words.

Clarke drinks more water and sits up against the wall, grinding her knuckles into her eyes. The little spots remind her that she hasn't gone blind yet; it's just really, really dark. She watches them fade from her vision, and remembers staring out the spaceports as a child, watching the stars roll by as the Ark twisted and turned.


	3. Chapter 3

She's going to go insane down here, sitting silent in the creepy dark pit. It's some kind of horrible grounder punishment, or it's a twisted experiment from Mt. Weather. Bellamy's going to go crazy, too, if his sleep talking is any indication. He's been muttering for the last couple of minutes, and Clarke thinks maybe she should wake him up.

She feels her way across the floor until her fingers land on his hair. He doesn't seem to notice; it sounds like a bad nightmare. "Bellamy," Clarke says, shaking his shoulder. "Bellamy, wake up."

"No," he murmurs, his limbs twitching, trying to fight through the sleep-paralysis so he can defend himself. "No... don't..."

She jostles him some more, but he's deep in the nightmare. She shouts his name louder, and after another minute of trying to wake him up, he starts awake with a gasp. "Clarke! Clarke?"

"Bad dream?"

Bellamy sighs deeply. "Yeah. Something like that." His jeans rustle against the floor as he sits up. Clarke can practically feel the weight of all the things he's not saying.

"You okay?"

"Huh? Yeah." He yawns loudly. "I blame the soup."

There's a long silence again, filled with things neither of them will say. Clarke listens to Bellamy breathe next to her. She's trying to find something to talk about, but everything she thinks of—parents, grounders, who's keeping them captive, is anyone going to come get them—is stupid or depressing or not likely to be something Bellamy will talk about.

"Clarke?" Bellamy asks, and this time it's quiet, hesitant.

"Yeah?"

A pause. "Never mind."

"What?"

"Nothing. I just... wanted to make sure you were still there."

Clarke snorts. "Like I have somewhere to go."

Silence.

"Sorry. That was mean."

More silence.

"Bellamy?"

He doesn't answer. Clarke only knows he's there because she can hear him breathing.

"Say something. We're both going to go batshit if we don't figure something out."

"There's no way out of here," he points out, like he's not stating the painfully obvious.

"So? We're no use to anyone who rescues us if we've gone completely bonkers down here."

"Okay, fine. So, what? Do you have glow-in-the-dark cards in your back pocket or something?"

"You want to sit in the dark and quietly go crazy?" she snaps. "I'm sure there's a perfectly good patch of floor over on the other side of the room for you to lay down and go back to your nightmares."

He's quiet for a while, and Clarke is about to give up and start reciting every word she knows in the grounder language when he says, "No. Look, I just... I don't like it. I really don't like it in here."

Clarke feels along the ground until she finds his knee, and then she scoots hers right up against it. She sits cross-legged, facing him, and when he mirrors her, their knees are pressed together, a reminder that, even if they can't find anything to say, neither one of them is going to go crazy alone down here. "I don't like it either."

There's another silence before Bellamy says, "Do you think someone will come after us?"

"Someone will." Someone has to.

They sit in silence and Clarke realizes that she doesn't know what happened, how they got into this pit. Maybe the whole camp was raided, or no one has realized they're gone, or they're all locked up. Maybe no one's coming for them because she and Bellamy are the only ones left.

She shivers and then she can't stop shivering, even though she tells herself it's not true, she and Bellamy aren't the only Sky People left. She has to believe they'll get out of here. She has to be strong; she's the fearless, unwavering leader of the Sky People.

"Clarke?" Bellamy's voice is soft, gentle, and as tentative as the hands resting on her knees.

_I'm fine_, she wants to say—has to say—but the words that come out are small, fearful, shaky things: "I'm scared."

"We'll get out of here," Bellamy says, and Clarke knows he has just as much faith in the truth of it as she does. His hands are warm, comforting on her knees, and she puts hers on top of his. He thinks she's pushing him away like she always does, but she holds onto his hands when he tries to take them back, and they sit in the dark like that for a minute or two, knees pressed together, hands clasped between them.

"Thanks," she says. The shaking is gone, but the terror that they're stuck here alone isn't. "Do you remember anything?"

"No. You?"

"Nothing." Clarke takes her hands away from his and folds her arms tightly across her chest.

"Clarke."

"What?"

"We're gonna be okay."

"We're stuck in a pit with no light and no food."

"There's soup," he suggests.

"There's _drugged_ soup."

"Could be worse. They could have put us in separate dark pits."

Clarke frowns. "Why didn't they?"

"Maybe there's only one super dark pit. Or all the others are full."

"If I wanted to torture someone like this, I'd put them in the room alone." There's an epiphany just out of her reach, but it floats away, and Clarke slouches miserably. "Probably just ran out of space," she agrees.

Bellamy nudges her knee with his. "Come on, princess. I can't be that bad a cell-mate."

Clarke huffs. "I'd rather be stuck here with someone else," she mutters.

There's a pause, and then Bellamy's incredulous, "_What_."

"No, I mean—" and she's embarrassed to say it because it's childish and stupid— "If you weren't in here with me, I'd know someone was looking for me."

"Camp Jaha needs its leader," Bellamy says by way of answer.

Clarke glares at him through the darkness and says tersely, "Right."

"You're mad?"

"No," she lies, and the lie is transparent even in the dark.

"You are."

"Forget it." Clarke pulls her knees up to her chest, isolating herself. She glares coldly into the darkness, cursing it for taking away one of her greatest and most formidable powers.

After a few minutes, Bellamy says, "We are going to get out of here, one way or another."

"Maybe when we're dead," Clarke mutters.

Bellamy moves to sit next to her, shoulder to shoulder. "I would," he offers. "Come look for you, I mean."

"Yeah," she says dismissively.

"You're a good friend, and those are getting really hard to come by lately."

Clarke snorts.

"Not to mention you're pretty good at keeping me out of trouble." He sways a little, like he's considering something. "There was that time you let me get kidnapped by mountain men, though."

"I had my reasons," she answers, and remembering it makes her cold with rage. He'd gotten out—and so had the others—but the mountain men had done some horrible things, things some of them wouldn't recover from, things that couldn't be stitched or splinted or salved.

"I know," he says. "We would have only found bodies if you hadn't." He squeezes her arm. "You did the right thing."

Clarke doesn't move, even though part of her wants to lean into him, to find strength in him instead of in herself for once. "Yeah." She doesn't think about what might have happened.

She wonders, though, about what did happen. She had seen Bellamy when they were rescuing the 47 and the grounders, but only briefly, and when she finally got a chance to talk to him later, her mother had already patched him up. He refused to talk about what had happened to him in Mt. Weather.

"Bellamy... what happened in Mt. Weather?"

"Clarke—"

"No. I need to know what they did to you." _What I did to you._

Bellamy lets out a long, slow breath. He tells whole tale from the morning he and Lincoln left to the first time he saw Clarke again. His storytelling is slow, halting, but he tells it all the way through, and at the end Clarke doesn't say anything, just leans against Bellamy and puts her arms around him. If she'd known—

_No_, she thinks. If she'd known, she'd have floated the plans and probably gotten everyone killed in her attempt to save him from the mountain men. And they had done more and worse to the others... Clarke shudders, her shoulders tense with rage.

Bellamy's hand skates across her shoulders. "It's okay. It's over," he says, and he's trying to comfort her, even though _he_ was the one at the mercy of the mountain men, and it's just so _wrong_.

Clarke's nails dig into her palms. "I'm sorry," she mutters.

"No." Bellamy's hands on her shoulders turn her toward him. "We saved our people, Clarke. Don't be sorry about that."

Clarke grips his forearms with her hands and hangs her head. "Bellamy..."

"What's done is done," he tells her, and his hands move from her shoulders to her neck to her jaw. "You saved our people. You made peace with the grounders. Nobody else can do what you do."

"I know. I know." Clarke shakes her head. "I just—never mind." She lets go of him, and he lets go of her, and she lays down on the floor, curling into herself. "I just want to sleep for a while."

Bellamy lays down, too, and he presses his knees against hers, and she sleeps without dreaming.

* * *

_**A/N:** Might be worth noting that this fic was written right after 2x09._


	4. Chapter 4

Bellamy doesn't sleep well. It's his anguished cries that wake her up, and for a minute she thinks he's actually awake, but he's responding to something—some kind of pain—that can't be coming from the world she's in. She fumbles in the darkness—he's moved away from her in his sleep—and finds him only after his fist finds her shoulder. She shakes his shoulders and calls his name until he starts awake, gasping.

He's drenched in sweat, and when he sits up, he's shaking. Clarke presses her hands to his shoulders. "Bellamy."

"I'm fine." He's still breathing heavily, but the shaking is subsiding now that he's fully awake. "I'm awake."

"Don't move," she commands, and she stumbles around the outside of the room until she finds the pitcher of water. She grabs it and retraces her steps back, then strips down to her bra, puts her sweater back on, and dunks her tanktop in the pitcher of water. "Come on, take your shirt off."

"What?"

Clarke wrings the tanktop over his head, and he gasps at the cold water. "Take off the shirt."

"That's cold," he complains, but he accidentally elbows her trying to get his damp shirt off over his head, and he doesn't say anything when she wipes the sweat from his shoulders and his back and his hair and his face, the way she used to help her mother bathe the bedridden patients on the Ark. He's tense, and it's only when she starts to wash his chest that she realizes his stiff posture might be steeling him against something other than the cold water.

"Sorry," she says, setting the shirt and the pitcher aside and handing him his shirt. "I thought you'd feel better if—" She leaves the rest of the sentence off, because whatever she was going to say would sound completely moronic.

"Thank you," he says, and his voice sounds like gravel and things Clarke doesn't want to think about. Not now. Not here.

She washes her own face, using the sleeve of her sweater to dry, puts the pitcher back on the tray, and sits back down somewhere near Bellamy. His hand on her shoulder startles her. She expects him to say something, but he presses his thumbs into the tense knots of her shoulders, and with the same slow, methodical movements, he mimicks the care she gave him. Clarke can't help but relax—it does feel really nice—and for a moment she forgets about the darkness and the pit and the drugged food and the terror. But then she remembers whose hands are gently rubbing the knots out of her shoulders and the fear comes back, along with a growing hunger and a pang in her stomach. She tenses, and Bellamy stops. His hands retreat, but she turns and catches him before he can move.

"Thank you," she murmurs, and she wishes she could see his face. She feels it, though, with her fingers, traces the bridge of his nose and the sweep of his cheeks and the line of his jaw, and he does the same and without any warning, he's kissing her, and she can't help but kiss him, too, even in the darkness. This isn't how it's supposed to be, says a little voice in her head, but she ignores it and her fingers tangle in Bellamy's hair and his hands are on her waist and she's shifting closer to him and her knee lands on his foot and he just winces a little and pulls her onto his lap. She can't see his face, but she can feel his heartbeat in his pulse point when her lips find it and his pulse is racing like hers and she thought she was hungry for food but now she's just hungry and she isn't the only one and suddenly she's laying on the floor with Bellamy half on top of her and half next to her, kissing her jaw and her neck and her collarbone and w_hat am I doing_—

"Bellamy," she says with as much force as she can muster, which isn't much.

He stops kissing her, but his face is still nestled in her neck. "Clarke," he whines.

She wants to say _Not here, not here, not now, not in this creepy dark pit of despair_, but the words won't form in her throat and nothing's how it's supposed to be on the ground, so why should this be any different? "I can't see a thing," she whispers.

He laughs, and his breath is warm on her skin but gives her chills anyway, and she kisses him again, and she forgets about the pit and the soup and the questions and it's just her and Bellamy together in the dark and she laughs a little bit but mostly she's breathless because _holy shit Bellamy where did you learn that_ and she's trying to reciprocate but he's relentless and she's melting into the floor.

It's only when she starts bucking against him and tugging on his waistband that he hesitates. "Clarke—"

"Bellamy," she whines.

He kisses her pulse point, making her shiver, and whispers, "I can't see a thing."

"Shut up," she laughs, and then they're all hands and lips and fumbling in the dark at buttons and zippers and fabric, but Bellamy, at least, knows how to navigate in the dark and Clarke doesn't bother with thinking any more, she just _does_ only Bellamy won't let her _do_ anything. His fingers and lips and tongue find places she didn't know were that sensitive and they move in their own rhythm until the darkness explodes with stars and they're left panting and shaking and covering each other with sweet little kisses in the dark.


	5. Chapter 5

They go again twice before they're tired enough to get dressed again and take a nap, limbs tangled together, and Bellamy actually sleeps soundly for a few hours. He wakes up after Clarke does, but she's been lying still so she doesn't wake him; he wastes no time peppering her with kisses.

She returns a few of his kisses, but she's come back to reality, and the reality is that they're stuck in this pit and she's seriously starting to wonder if anyone knows where they are. The intense fear has softened a little, but she knows it's just because she's pressed up against Bellamy, and while she admits it's nice to not wake up alone in the dark, nothing has really changed.

"Clarke?" Bellamy asks, and she realizes she's leaning away from him.

"Sorry," she says. "Just... you know. Darkness. Pit of despair."

His playful mood evaporates, and his hand runs down her arm to lace their fingers together. "I know. The good news is, if anyone was nearby earlier, they probably know where we are."

Clarke's cheeks flush hot in the darkness and Bellamy chuckles. She punches him in the chest, because she doesn't want to miss.

"Just trying to keep morale up, princess." He plants a kiss on her forehead. "Seriously, though. We're gonna be okay."

Clarke isn't sure about that, but time passes and they talk or kiss or make love or sleep. If they aren't talking—and usually if they are—they're touching, constantly reminding each other that neither is alone. They find out that the water isn't drugged, although after three more trays, they decide they're hungry enough to eat the soup again. The soup is drugged, though, and not even Clarke pressed against him is enough to keep Bellamy from having nightmares under the influence of the soup. Clarke has more vivid dreams, too, but these ones are about a city full of people and buildings tall as the sky and so many lights that it's never quite dark again.

They sleep off the last of the soup tangled together. Clarke dreams of the sky, blue and clear, and familiar faces pulling her up and carrying her through the forest. She wakes up alone in her tent back at camp. "Bellamy?" she mumbles. Someone's left a lantern on, and she can see she's alone. She sits up, rubbing her eyes, and her mom comes in.

"Clarke, how's your head?"

Clarke vaguely remembers a headache, or hitting her head, or something. "I'm fine. Where's Bellamy?"

Abby frowns. "Bellamy?"

Clarke feels panic rise in her chest.

"I would imagine he's working," Abby continues. "Come on. It's almost lunch time, and I hear the cooks have made something special today."

Clarke follows her mom out of the tent, but as soon as they're outside, she makes a beeline for the all-too-familiar mop of dark hair that's swinging an axe viciously at some innocent firewood. "Bellamy."

He splits another log with a powerful swing and leaves the axe in the stump he's using as a chopping block. "Hey."

"Lunch time."

"I'm starving," he says. "What's for lunch?"

Raven walks by cradling a big cup. "It's soup," she says, grinning as she breathes deeply over the cup.

The smell wafts through the open air and Clarke glances at Bellamy. He looks uneasy. "I'm... not hungry." He yanks the axe out of the stump and puts another log down.

"Yeah," Clarke says. "Me neither." She folds her arms over her chest. "How long have you been here?" she asks him.

He shrugs. "Since I woke up this morning." He doesn't seem to remember what she remembers, or maybe it was all a dream. But he'd lost his appetite as soon as Raven said soup, and Clarke is convinced it's not a coincidence.

"Didn't you say you were starving?" she asks, trying to be playful.

Bellamy just shrugs. "I don't like soup."

Clarke squints at him. There haven't been many times on the ground where they've had soup, but she doesn't remember him ever refusing it before. "Bellamy," she says firmly, a hand on his arm.

He stares at her, and his eyes are as dark as the pit, but his expression is terrifyingly blank. Clarke lets go of him.

"Sorry. I just—I had a weird dream." She tucks her hand back under her arm. "Nightmare, I guess. I couldn't see a thing." She looks pointedly at him, hoping.

Something flickers across his face, and then he turns to the chopping block and drives the axe down into the log, splitting it clean in two. Clarke fights the horrible tension in her chest and walks back to her tent, or maybe she runs.

She's sitting in front of the lantern drawing, trying to forget the darkness by sketching the cities of her dreams-within-a-dream, when there's a rustling outside her tent.

"Knock knock," Bellamy calls.

"Come in," Clarke says, even though she doesn't really want to, not while she's trying to forget the darkness.

He sits next to her on the floor of her tent, so close that their shoulders touch, and she shies away. He doesn't say anything; he wants to, she can see it in the way his lips work against his teeth, but he's having trouble.

She pulls her knees up and gets so close to her sketchbook that her nose is almost smudging the lines.

"It wasn't a dream, was it?" he asks.

Clarke blinks. She sets the sketchbook on the floor and hugs her knees. "I guess not."

"I wanted it to be. I hoped it was, but—"

"You wanted it to be a dream?" she balks.

"Yes." He's unapologetic, but Clarke can see something else in his expression. In the back of her mind, she revels in the simple fact that she can see his expression; outwardly, she glares at him. "Didn't you?"

"Not all of it." She feels defensive when she says it, like she's been caught in a lie.

He sighs and his chin drops to his chest. "I didn't want—" He sucks in a deep breath and looks up, his gaze snapping to her. "I didn't want it to be like that." Under his freckles and the smudges of dirt on his cheeks, his skin turns progressively darker shades of pink.

Clarke wants to scream, not because she hates that that's how Bellamy feels, but because she feels precisely the same way. She just stares at Bellamy for a while, until she thinks he might explode, and then she leans against him and turns her face into his shoulder. "What happened?" she asks, but it's not really a question.

Bellamy's arm settles on her shoulder, and after a bit of shifting, they're in each other's arms just like all those hours in the pit, only now they can see. Bellamy kisses her, but it's a short kiss, not a hungry one. "We got out," he says.

"Yeah. I guess we did." She knows that if she stays where she is, people will talk, and the grounders who don't like her will see Bellamy as even more of a target, but she can't bring herself to move. Not yet.

She does, eventually, because they have to sleep or they'll be useless tomorrow and there's work to be done, but Clarke doesn't trust the light any more. It's a long time before she stops expecting to wake up in the dark.

* * *

_**A/N:** Thanks for coming along for the ride! Make what you will of what actually happened._


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